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ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
second nature allows us to see where we come from, where we are, and what
constitutes our unique potential for creating a responsible and ethical
ecological future.
The antidote to our negative feelings about humanity (or our
‘anti-humanism’), is to see what is best in humanity, tracing the origins of these
qualities back to first nature itself, exploring our erotic origins in, and
resonance with, natural history. What we like most about the idea of ‘nature5,
the ‘innocence5 we describe, resonates, with humanity’s cooperative
sensibility—the antithesis to capitalist rationalization, greed, and corruption.
What we love most about particular landscapes, the unbounded interplay
between symmetry and dissonance, the dance of form, depth, light, and
color—these qualities resurface within our own sensual and intellectual
creativity. They resurface within our own differentiative desire to combine
spontaneity with reason, widening the horizons of meaning, beauty, and
poetry. What we savor in ‘nature5 and society is the expression of die erotic in
its many forms: the striving for such relational pleasures as interdependence,
creativity, self-determination, and self and collective development—in both the
social and natural worlds.
To say tiiat ‘humanity5 is part of nature means more than acknowledging
a biological inheritance from an evolutionary past, more than recognizing
humanity’s incorporation of ancient cellular structures and spinal columns
among the first vertebrates. While appreciating this biological inheritance, we
must comprehend the qualitative implications of inheriting a biology that is
marked by a developmental trend toward increasing complexity and
consciousness. We must also recognize that humanity is potentially a qualitative
and erotic elaboration within natural history of all that we love about the idea
of ‘nature5: a trend toward increasing sensuality, mutualism, creativity, and the
relentless insistence on diverging, ordering, and becoming. Exploring the
evolutionary relationship between a first and second nature allows us to
understand both the erotic continuity and differences between the natural and
social worlds. We may perhaps begin to transcend this anti-humanism, looking
back through natural history to see what is best in ourselves winking back at
us in a nascent form.
TowarcI An ObjECTivE UNdERSTANdiNq Of Soc'iaI DesIre
We may now consider whether there is ethical meaning that can be gleaned
from the notion of evolutionary difference. Are there, indeed, ethical
implications to be drawn from the fact that natural evolution moves in a
developmental trend from the simple to the more complex, from the conscious
to the self-conscious, and from the eco-erotic to the sodo-erotic? What does it
mean that tendendes in first nature toward mutualism, differentiation, and